photo credit: Ocean Cleanup
UPDATED: 7 Aug 2025, to fix typos and to repeat myself about real solutions, because commenters simply will not click on the links to other articles where I deal with these solutions in depth
To some, this one is a really sacred cow for some reason. And frankly I find the smell of sacred cows delicious when they’re put on the barbeque.
I commented on a post about the Ocean Cleanup the other day. For those of you who don’t know, Ocean Cleanup is a company founded in 2013 by a Dutch 18 yr old named Boyan Slat, intent on removing macroplastic from the surface of oceans. And I got quite a bit of blowback from fans of the concept, the company, or both.
The post I criticized had been spread by a connection of mine, but was likely AI generated, like a lot of the garbage that dominates my LinkedIn feed these days. It promoted the idea that if you see something in the world that you think needs fixing, you should jump in and try to fix it. You should, to quote my connection, “Jump in and start. Iterate, fail, improve, fail, learn, succeed”. Ocean Cleanup is cited as a success story for that strategy. But more than that, it’s a meme: a meme about how a teenage boy, through grit and perseverance and the ability to tell a good story, changed the world.
Like many truisms, it sounds like good advice. We don’t get anywhere if we just talk, and don’t act.
But it is, in fact, extremely bad advice.
What’s missing? The first step. THINK. Gather data. Learn. Analyze. Then focus your effort on solving the right problem, at the right part of the problem chain. An hour in the library can save months in the lab. And these days, you don’t even need to go to the library for pity’s sake! We all have the library in our pocket.
And that’s what the Ocean Cleanup was missing from the get-go: the problem analysis step.
Analyzing a Problem
I spent the first five years of my career in water treatment. Developing new technology, and using it to solve real world water treatment problems. As evidence, here’s a picture of me in 1992 or so, in the back woods of a Trident submarine base, doing full-contact water treatment system piloting. I was not only running a complex advanced oxidation pilot plant, in a tent, on a generator, I was also doing my own analysis, running an HPLC off that same generator. We were treating groundwater containing historic contamination from explosives disposal, and were routinely reducing concentrations from 10s of ppm each of TNT, TNB, RDX and other dangerous materials, to below the HPLC/UV detection limit of about 5 ppb. I am mentioned as co-inventor on patents from those days, but they’re all public domain now- and aside from the token amount given to us as “consideration” to make the patent assignment contract legal, none of them ever made me personally any money. But it was, for sure, a top-notch learning experience which served as the jumping off point of a multi-decade career focused on technology development.
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And for the next 25 years, I donated time by teaching a section of a 4th year chemical engineering water treatment course at the University of Waterloo- a way I could repay my debt of gratitude to the university that would benefit the students directly.
In my course materials, the first section was devoted to properly analyzing a water treatment problem. And it correctly put the primary effort into moving as far upstream as possible, to find the source of the pollution that was causing the problem. Eliminate the problem at its source. It may be as simple as training employees, or firing bad ones, or changing materials and methods that are being used in something really trivial. End of pipe solutions are to be reached for only as a last resort, and they are to be used to treat the effluent of the smallest pipe, as far upstream, as possible.
Why?
The 2nd law of thermodynamics. Fighting entropy costs energy which costs money. Always.
Analyzing the Problem of Plastic in the Oceans
A basic analysis of the problem of plastic in the oceans must begin with combatting a number of myths. I can’t do a better job of this than Chris DeArmitt already has. Here’s a link to a page from his Plastic Paradox website which gives lots of relevant information:
A couple of things right off the bat:
1) Most of the mass of plastics in the oceans is macroplastics, meaning pieces larger than about 0.5 cm in at least one dimension
2) Most macroplastics in the oceans comes from two places:
a. The fishing industry- and their macroplastic debris includes materials very damaging to sea life such as ghost nets and lines
b. Poor people living along 10 major rivers in Asia and Africa. These people lack the basic sanitation and waste collection infrastructure to keep their waste plastics from being washed into rivers and hence into the ocean
3) Microplastics are generated not just from the breakdown of macroplastics that find their way into the environment, but also from sources like the wearing of rubber tires and coatings used on ships and sea structures, laundry of synthetic fibres etc.
4) Neither microplastics nor typical macroplastics from the breakdown of waste articles washed out to sea, have meaningful evidence of harm from the plastic particles themselves, at the exposure rates that are encountered in nature.
5) The notion that waste materials that were properly disposed of in Europe or North America, are more than a very small fraction of the waste plastic materials found in the ocean due to illegal dumping and the waste/recycling trade, is false. While only a small fraction of properly disposed plastic waste is recycled, the balance is either incinerated (i.e. dumping the effluent into the gaseous ocean we all depend on for our lives, the atmosphere) or landfilled. And in the latter case, the emissions from buried plastic, simply cease. Plastics, protected from oxygen and sunlight, can remain stable in landfill for tens of thousands of years.
Had Boyan Slat done the first step properly, he wouldn’t have started with an attempt to passively filter plastic garbage from the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
He’d have rapidly realized that measured plastic densities even in these legendary “gyres”, where currents cause surface debris to collect, are (based on a quick Google search) on the order of 10-100 kg of plastic per square kilometre of ocean. DeArmitt’s website puts that figure as closer to 1 kg/km2 at most, based on better data from Chris’s more extensive reading of the literature, but let’s give the Google hyperbole its due for a moment. To put that in context: assume that the materials are all found within the top metre of depth, and let’s believe the 100 kg/km2 figure- which might be 2 orders of magnitude too high. 100 kg/km2 is 100 kg of plastic in 10^9 kg of seawater, to a first approximation. That’s 100 parts per billion (ppb).
For reference, CO2 in the atmosphere is 416 parts per million, or 416,000 ppb. And you know, or should know already, what I think of direct air capture as a GHG emission mitigation strategy.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin
If at First You Don’t Analyze- At Least Learn, and Pivot
After spending tens of millions of dollars on failed trials of passive collectors that drift along on the top of the sea (the meme that the company was founded on, to much media fanfare), the company now focuses on two areas: towed net systems, and river interceptors.
Can you guess which of these two collects more plastic, at a lower cost? Prevents more harm?
Which of these two options would a basic, five minute analysis have led the company toward, if that analysis had been done- and more importantly, if the founder’s meme could possibly have been identified for what it was- a naïve idea from a teenager who was, at the time, more or less ignorant of the real issues- and then abandoned as a bad idea?
Ocean Cleanup has, per its website, collected about 8,500 tonnes of waste plastic from oceans and rivers in 2023, at a cost of over $5/kg of waste collected. They made some $300 designer sunglasses out of some of that waste plastic apparently, as a funding gimmick. And that $5/kg, i.e. at least 5x the purchase price of the plastic itself, is an improvement from previous efforts by a considerable margin. But is this scheme to be taken seriously?
Who Funds the Ocean Cleanup Meme?
It started with crowdfunding, but rapidly moved on to ultra-rich philanthropists and corporate donations- including Coca Cola. Rather like Oxy Petroleum bought Carbon Engineering, major emitters find it useful to buy memes like this, in aid of predatory delay against real actions that would curb their contribution toward emissions. And that, folks, is why I hate these memes. False hope in false future solutions, serve as predatory delay strategies against real action.
OK, Smartass- What Should We Do About the Plastic Waste Crisis?
Let’s be clear: nobody should want plastic in the oceans, or deliberately put it there. It doesn’t belong there.
The majority of the mass of plastic waste is of the cheapest plastics, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), and most of it was originally used as single use packaging. Neither molecule is itself particularly hazardous. While these materials can be recycled mechanically into fairly low value goods, and broken down chemically (partially) into valuable waxes and other materials to serve small markets, the main options for their disposal remain incineration, waste-to-fuels schemes (i.e. incineration, once removed), and landfilling. Of these options, landfilling is the best by far. Nations that don’t like landfilling because they are too precious with their land, should either reduce the mass of plastic waste they generate by means of severe deposit-return schemes so more of it can be collected clean and separated for recycling, or they should pay other nations to landfill it for them. Air-filling should not be on the table, given that plastic in landfill is utterly non-hazardous, and stores its fossil origin CO2 more or less permanently.
UPDATE: the comments indicate clearly that I have to repeat myself. This is all covered in other articles, links to which have been provided, but here goes. Here’s how we should deal with plastic waste:
1) The cost burden of post-consumer handling of plastic waste, needs to be borne by the people who benefit from the use of plastic in the first place. That’s also a necessary but insufficient solution to GHG emissions by the way. There are many ways to implement this, and societies need to debate amongst themselves which methods suit their needs and values best
2) Substitutions should never be done on the basis of a naturalistic fallacy. Paper usually has an inferior LCA performance against fossil plastic when the base case for fossil plastic is landfill disposal, as just one example
3) Some societies will decide, in accordance with their values, that certain single uses of plastics are not valuable enough to merit their environmental impact. Fair enough- again, as long as those decisions are based on good, solid, 3rd party LCAs, with the right reference case for comparison. Otherwise, expect impacts to be worse rather than better, and for small, visible problems to be replaced with larger but invisible ones
4) Deposit-return schemes are one valid way to transfer end use costs to up-front users, and to ensure that plastics return properly separated and clean for mechanical recycling. Where this is done (with PET bottles in Scandinavia, and in PEI in Canada, return rates are astoundingly high). By the way, this is needed even moreso with aluminum cans, which have huge embodied emissions and energy. Every aluminum can that ends up in landfill is an abject environmental tragedy
5) Mechanical recycling is low impact and has an excellent LCA when done properly, but requires markets for the recycled goods to be at all feasible. With recycling rates of less than 10% of plastics currently, it’s hard to see that increasing to 50% ever
6) A stream of waste plastic that is too mixed and/or dirty will inevitably be generated at some point. The options for disposing of that stream are incineration, i.e. air-filling, pyrolysis and other waste to energy schemes, i.e. incineration once removed, and landfilling. The only one of these that has any environmental merit, at all, is landfilling. And no, that’s not an argument in favour of landfilling mixed municipal solid waste, either. We’re only talking about the plastic waste portion. Separation is still required, with wet organics going to anaerobic digestion to make biogas, which has high value post decarbonization.
But you can’t dispose waste properly if you don’t collect it in the first place. And no waste disposal solution can fix that problem. That requires regulation and enforcement, and public investment in infrastructure. It’s not a problem the market can solve. Just like climate change.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/waste-energy-fuels-great-greenwashing-machine-paul-martin
(and beware of chemical recycling of plastics- it can be valid, but it can also be incineration with a thick coat of obscuring greenwash)
If we care about plastics in the oceans, our first focus must be on the fishing industry because their gear, whether it be crab pots or fishing lines or nets, is inarguably damaging to marine life including endangered species such as whales.
Our next focus must be on improving sanitation for the poorest people living next to the most populated river systems in the world. Improved sanitation and waste disposal won’t just keep plastic out of the oceans- it will save lives. And yes, that’s a hard problem to solve, because frankly we don’t seem to care much about poor people, beyond feigned concern.
Frankly I’m not at all concerned about microplastics in the ocean from the wear of coatings or from laundry of synthetic fibres. Why not? Because I’ve seen no evidence that they cause harm, and have heard of no credible mechanism by which the plastic particles themselves should be expected to cause harm. And if we do find evidence to warrant concern, the ocean is the last place to bother with these, for one simple reason: the oceans are vast, and concentrations are going to be very, very low. And we already know, or should know, that humans are positively shit at evaluating comparative risk. That evaluation needs to be done by professionals who are trained to do it, rather than relying on public perception.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safe-limit-alcohol-really-paul-martin
Criticism of My Position
Several commentors on my contact’s post, were quite aghast at my criticism of Ocean Cleanup. Several told me to stop criticizing things and to propose my own solutions.
Well, folks, I have done so. Many times. And in fact I’ve even edited my article to include a detailed re-iteration of my proposed solutions- even though they’re already presented in previous articles, links to which have been provided.
Those who think I’m a worthless curmudgeon who merely shits on other people’s ideas and has none of his own, are encouraged to read a few of my articles, particularly this one, which deals with the most pressing issue of our times in my opinion: our need to totally reorganize our entire relationship with energy. This piece has not been anywhere nearly as well read as I’d have liked, and yet has needed very little revision since I wrote it originally.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-energy-solutions-paul-martin
Disclaimer: this article has been written by a human, who does love the smell of roasted sacred cow. If I’ve made a mistake- which happens- or let my taste for roast meat get in the way of the accuracy of my analysis, then by all means bring this to my attention and, with proper references and review, I’ll be grateful to change my analysis to better fit the new data.
If however the problem you have with my article is the mere fact that I’ve skewered your sacred cow, then I encourage you to take it up with my employer, Spitfire Research Inc., who will be more than happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.